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"An Application for Indicating Cognitive Competence as measured by the Mini Mental State Exam." S. McQuoney. W. Wallace. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde. 2019. Download PDF (BibTeX) SD

Abstract:
In today's information society, where most of the population is heavily reliant on technology it is note surprising that the digital health sector is growing exponentially due to many realising the value that technology has in facilitating the current healthcare system. The information society has also meant that governments are having to adapt legislation and adjust their ideologies to reflect today's technology driven culture. Once such example of this is the change being made to current legislation regarding last the creation of a last will and testament. A start-up company hoping to take advantage of these legislative changes approached the University for expert advice concerning an application they aimed to build - a mobile application that is used to make last a will and testament. It became clear that an assessment of competence was needed for such an application to exist.

The need for a competence measure led to the main basis of this thesis: create a proof of concept that will test the cognitive competence of an individual. This dissertation takes a psychological paper based cognitive impairment examination and attempts to implement this digitally into a mobile application. The final aim of which is to create a digital version of the Mini Mental State Examination that is ready to be equivalence tested in future to determine if it could be used in practice.

The numerous ethical implications surrounding the implementation of a cognitive impairment test are discussed in detail as well as the methodology used to design and build such an application. The outcomes of in-depth expert evaluations and acceptance tests are discussed and used to demonstrate that the proof of concept built is ready to be evaluated further in future to determine the equivalence of the digital version of the MMSE compared to the original paper based version to see it if can be used in practice.

It is important to consider not only the use of this for an application that allows users to make a will but the scope of such a system in relation to the healthcare system and management of those suffering from cognitive dysfunction within the digital healthcare sector.